Innovations in electronics and technology have made it possible to incorporate a variety of advanced features on automotive vehicles. Many electronic devices and multiple electronic controllers or processors are typically included on modern vehicles. There are standard communication protocols for such devices to communicate with each other over a vehicle controller area network (CAN).
One issue presented by the proliferation of electronics on vehicles is the necessity to manage the ongoing, time series communications over the vehicle CAN. The industry standard protocol has worked well for on-vehicle communications among the devices. Managing and using the information or data shared over the vehicle CAN for off-vehicle purposes such as analysis, however, is challenging. The vehicle CAN continuously carries data communications among various devices on the vehicle. On average approximately 500 Kilobytes of data is generated every minute. Over time, communicating that volume of such data from the vehicle to a remote location becomes difficult to manage.
Vehicle manufacturers, for example, desire to obtain the CAN data from vehicles for various analyses. The volume of vehicle CAN data and the continuous nature of the communications including such data makes it very difficult to communicate all of the data in an efficient manner from the vehicle CAN to a remote device accessible to appropriate computing devices or personnel. The channel bandwidth and processor occupancy required just for transferring all such data presents significant drawbacks and challenges.
It would be useful to have an efficient way of managing vehicle CAN data that allows for it to be transferred from the vehicle at a relatively low processing and channel bandwidth cost.